The title says it all

Writing this inaugural post, I feel a little like the uninvited guy at the party who shows up 2 hours late wearing the wrong clothes. No really. Before I could summon up the courage to fill out the ridiculously short form on WordPress, I had to convince myself that I actually had something worthwhile to say. Well, I didn’t convince myself. My father who has blogged for the last 2 years explained to me that my experience and interests were unique enough to warrant starting a blog. Lets hope he’s right.

Once I had decided that i was going to blog, I then agonized about what i wanted to blog about. As a graduate student at the Institute of Design, the topic of design or innovation was obvious but I wasn’t sure what I would say that was unique. There an amazing variety of excellent blogs covering these topic including those of my friends Jon Campbell and Ash Bhoopathy who are excellent bloggers of their own right. So that was out, well not entirely.

One pearl of wisdom from my father was that unless I blogged about something I was interested in, I would never keep it up. With this is mind, I tried to come up with a list of some of my interests. I was sure that blogging about eating or partying would not be very productive but my other interests of military history and cooking seemed to hold some promise. After more ruminating and a conversation with my parents, I realized I actually had a common theme that ran through my interests in design, strategy games and cooking. They all had an element of strategy and innovation. Before you begin to yawn or think that I’m crazy, hear me out.

The reason why I’m fascinated with strategy games, design and cooking is that in each of these, you are given base ingredients (things that shoot, design methods and spices) and it is up to you, using your creativity and experience to accomplish a task. There are the right ways to go about and the wrong ways to go about it and at the end, you see your results and start it all over again, trying to improve yourself. That’s fascinating to me.

So what I hope to write about are these interests of mine, in some seemingly sensible fashion and to hopefully learn something in the process.

There was also another pearl of wisdom that my father gave me that I conveniently ignored in writing this post – to keep it short. Sorry. I’ll try better next time.